I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking about how you can see every activity and every person on the camera --- yeah, that's how cameras work. There are thousands of public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at intersections, public streets, houses, playgrounds, schools; most of them operated that way deliberately.
There are Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you have to dig through the video to get to them, and they're not intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it. That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's playground", which is something you could have done last week or last year or last decade, or about a mental health police wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already wearing FOIA-able body cams.
If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen is a good reason to push back on Flock. But that's not what happened here.
Have you ever gone fishing? Did you catch all the fish?
Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and ensure that we are capturing every possible player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
Ok, you're the second person to say that, and I think my point is not clear enough. That's on me.
This response would make sense if I was saying "why focus on Flock, there are so many other ALPR cameras out there" (also true, but not relevant to my point).
But this is a video that is mostly about things that are true of all IP cameras, of the kind that we've had staring out onto public streets for decades, plural decades. People celebrated those cameras, thought they were super neat, built sites indexing them. All of them do most of the same things this video says those Flock cameras did, the tiny minority of Flock cameras you can access publicly.
In my experience, people respond much more strongly to naming a specific company or person. Clearer plan of action than a resigned “This tech is old news.”
Is the plan of action "eliminate all public IP cameras"? That's coherent, I'd get it, but that doesn't seem to be what he's saying at all. He used a Google search to find exposed Flock admin consoles (interesting! say more about that!) but he could just as easily have just searched "open IP cameras"; there's sites that do nothing but index those.
If your takeaway from that comment is that ‘tptacek thinks Flock’s tech is old news and he’s resigned about it, I think you’re going to be in for a treat.
But isn't that "auto-PTZ" exactly what changes the game here? Sure, there are plenty of open cameras, but usually, that's just a passive stream you have to stare at for hours to spot anything interesting. Here, we have a situation where technology has effectively removed the "friction" from the surveillance process. You don't need to monitor the screen for hours - the algorithm itself grabs the person, zooms in on the face, and tracks them. It’s like the difference between searching for a needle in a haystack by hand and having a powerful magnet. Because of the Flock leak, this magnet is now available to anyone with a link, and that is what's truly terrifying, not just the mere fact of filming a playground
He's pretty open in this video about how Flock is far from alone in this space, and he's just using them as an example because they're so popular and flagrantly abusive.
In what way this is an illustration of Flock's "flagrancy"? I'm seriously asking. I'm not a Flock supporter. My point is that cameras just as sensitive as the ones he shows here are deliberately public on the Internet.
His other two (much longer) videos go into those details. This one is more of a quick update.
Just to give you a sense of the kind of company we're dealing with, the CEO of Flock called the guy who made a Flock camera map an "antifa terrorist". He's unhinged.
Thanks! I know it's a big ask, but can you give me pointers (rough timestamps, whatever). A friend told me to watch this video for the distinctive Flock badness, and the time I spent on that was not rewarded.
It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example).
It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...
Thanks! I looked, but that's a segment about someone at Flock accusing anti-Flock people of being "antifa" or terrorists. I'm about as anti-Flock as I think it's possible to be (having been instrumental in killing it my Chicagoland suburb) and I'm not not sure what to do with "someone at Flock said something dumb".
In case it helps: my thing here is, the video we were commenting on thread seems to be about all public cameras, not just AI-assisted smart cameras or even security cameras more broadly. That was my complaint.
It's not that I don't think there's a video to do about 60 open Flock admin consoles; I'm sure there is. I'm just not sure what the implications are, because that video spent all its time talking about stuff that is trivially true of all public cameras, many of which are indexed on Google already, not through Google-dork searches for open console but instead with searches like "open IP camera live streams".
(I was struck by this in part because I vividly remember when Russia invaded Ukraine flipping between dozens of different live camera streams in places like Mariupol; that's obviously not the US, but you can do very similar stuff in the US, and on a lot more than 60 random misconfigured Flock cameras).
I think there may be something to the PTZ on the new Flock cameras that makes this worse? I just think he should make a better, sharper video case against them.
It's the attitude and marketing. Maybe not "flagrant" but "ambitious," "aggressive," and "expansive." I don't know the name of any other public surveillance/camera company, but I've heard about Flock, and the same is probably true of any of my neighbors who are even the least bit tech-following. They are also ambitiously funded for growth and expansion and their outward press attitude is congruent.
Other camera companies would like to see steady year-over-year growth in camera sales. Flock would like to see the world blanketed in 24/7 surveillance.
They make themselves a lightning rod as a business strategy.
If Flock vanished off the Earth tomorrow I think we'd see exactly the same ALPR penetration. Municipalities aren't buying these things because Flock's so good at selling them; they're buying because the ALPR vendors have an extremely compelling pitch! Two of our neighboring municipalities have non-Flock ALPRs; I think you're going to see a lot of non-Flock ALPR penetration in progressive-leaning suburbs, for instance, because progressives are all het up about Flock.
(I helped get Flock cancelled in Oak Park, where I live, and before that led the passage of what I believe to be the most restrictive ALPR regs/ordinance package in the country. I'm not an ALPR booster.)
But I'm going to keep saying: my thing about this video is that he's describing mostly things that are true of all public IP cameras. There are zillions of those!
I think everyone in this thread can agree that surveillance cameras should be fought against, no matter whose brand is stamped on them. Flock is still a better than average target because of the attitude they project and because of name recognition.
I pushed back on our Flock deployment because the particulars of its deployment meant that we were curbing more cars driven by innocent Black drivers than we were responding to any meaningful crimes, and because when we had Flock's alerts enabled, the net effect was to take our selectively-recruited, highly-trained, very expensive police force and turn them into failure-to-appear-warrant debt collectors for nearby suburbs with far worse police departments.
It was not some nerd† principled stand against "surveillance". My experience working on the public policy of this stuff is that when you take a stand against "surveillance", normal people --- and I'm in what I believe to be one of the 10 most progressive municipalities in the country, the most progressive municipality in Chicagoland --- look at you like you're a space alien.
There are Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you have to dig through the video to get to them, and they're not intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it. That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's playground", which is something you could have done last week or last year or last decade, or about a mental health police wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already wearing FOIA-able body cams.
If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen is a good reason to push back on Flock. But that's not what happened here.